In Germany, social media algorithms are pumping out huge amounts of far-right, pro-AfD content | A new study found that nearly 3/4 of all partisan content being pushed algorithmically to German users favored the far-right AfD
Posted by towngrizzlytown
6 Comments
Extract:
>Global Witness created brand new accounts on factory-reset devices on all three platforms — identities with no past behavior for an algorithm to draw conclusions from. On each platform, they then followed only eight other users: the official accounts of Germany’s four major parties and the accounts of each party’s leader. For each of those accounts, they read or watched its five most recent posts. That should have let the platform know the accounts were interested in political content, but not expressed any partisan position.
>They then went to each platform’s For You feed and started recording what they were being shown — classifying each post by whether it leaned right or left, whether it supported a particular party, and whether or not it was posted by one of those eight accounts they’d followed.
>Nearly three-quarters of the political content they were shown on TikTok (74%) and Twitter (72%) was right-leaning, and the largest share of that content was pro-AfD. Instagram’s content also leaned to the right, but to a lesser degree (59%).
I’m really scared of a shock result tomorrow where the current polls are decently wrong, the CDU underperforms, and AFD somehow snags 1st place. Not that they’d win a coalition, but still terrifying.
But I still believe in the deep state for now 🙏
Try to outmatch them/use bots then. Like I really don’t know why establishmemt parties do not realize they need to do this at this point. Same thing happened in Romania as well.
The researchers initially followed CDU, AfD, SPD, and the Greens. I’d like to see how the results change if one only follows one particular party, or all of the parties without AfD. I’m not sure how the bias towards AfD can be attributed the algorithm, or if there is simply more far right content out there.
The way they laid out this experiment is weird and not how your FYP page would work on a normal user account. It’s not just what you interact with but what other people interact with as well. It seems they tried to create a neutral FYP page that should reflect actual political margins in real life, but Tik Tok’s user base isn’t a reflection on Germany demographics it’s going to skew much younger. Secondly content creation also isn’t going to have an equal representation, the right engages in way more political shit posting and memes that going to draw a whole lot more interactions than traditional political content.
Either regulate those sites or straight up ban them, there is no other way to combat this.